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In other news, I had to RMA that hard drive I bought last month (on the 6th). It kept locking up, with no distinguishable pattern. Every once in a while I would click on the drive to access data stored there and the computer would freeze .. leaving me no option except a hard reset (push the button). That suks. I dealt directly with Seagate, not Newegg, who I bought the drive from. I like that Newegg includes all necessary info (product #, serial #) in the invoice-email they send .. so I didn't have to yank the drive. My RMA experience with Seagate was surprisingly good .. considering I hate having to RMA anything. Such of waste of time. Most manufacturers want you to run various drive-fitness tests. They send files, saying "Run this utility and send us the results." Seagate technical support said, "Yeah, it sounds bad. Here's your activity number." In their warranty dept, I talked to a girl who was a little hard to understand (Indian?), but very polite and professional. She even agreed to advance-ship me the new drive first. For this convenience, Seagate normally charges $24 .. which I protested as absurd. (The dang drive only cost $97 and Newegg shipped it for $2.99.) She put me on hold while talking to a supervisor and was able to get the fee waived. I was also surprised she didn't require a credit card number .. in case I failed to return the defective component. The drive is only intermittently problematic, so I want to leave it in the system until I get the new one. My boot/system drive comes *after* the defective drive .. so, I would have to edit the boot.ini file in order to boot, if I yanked the defective drive first and had to wait for a replacement. I select hard drives based on *reliability* .. since all current-generation drives in a given class (e.g. 7200-rpm IDE) will perform similarly. I doubt you would notice a real-world difference between the best- and worst-of-class. So when this drive started acting up (a couple of weeks ago), I was disappointed. (Sometimes they get knocked around in shipment.) Seagate drives are known to be the most reliable. I believe Seagate is the world's largest manufacturer of disk drives. Earlier this month, they released their 9th generation 7200-rpm drive: the 7200.9 .. which I am spec'ing into the new beast. (See here for their 2-page PDF.) Something I found interesting: only their 80 and 160-GB drives (7200.9) use their bleeding edge 160-GB-per-platter technology. All other drives use older (less dense) platters (typically 133-GB-per-platter). See here. Seems they're more interested in marketing the perfect size-capacity drive than employing the latest bleeding-edge technology .. which seems foolish to me. I don't care if a drive is 480-GB (3X160) vs exactly 400-GB (3X133) or 500-GB (4X125). They need to get over that. Stop letting the bean-counters make technical decisions. Seems deceptive that the newest drive (7200.9) doesn't always come with the latest technology (160-GB platters). For techies like me, it seems downright immoral. This is why I selected the 160-GB 7200.9 for the beast's "storage" drive, and not one of the other bigger ones (200, 250, 300, 400, 500). By the way, I couldn't help but notice Seagate's home page (like Radified's) uses the word indulge: More ways to indulge your growing appetite for storage. Not a very common word. My ego is convinced they got the idea here. Nothing wrong with a healthy ego, right? =) The end. |
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